Rimbaud is everywhere in the poems
but as indirection. ‘The Letter on Poetics’ at the end explains how he politicises
Rimbaud’s poetics. As he says in an interview (a good one, here):
the “systematic derangement of the senses” has
to mean the social senses, the world turned upside down. And then the very
fragile, damaged nature of his later work seems to me to be linked to that, in
that it’s coming out of the pain of that collective subjectivity returning to
an isolated, personal one. (Bonney nd)
Bonney also describes his writing
method, which contrasts collection with selection, improvisation with revision:
Pen to paper. I accumulate materials in my
notebooks – like I’m sure most people do – notes from reading, little bursts of
things and so forth. Eventually it’ll reach a critical mass, and I’ll sit at my
desk, the notebooks open, and improvise off them straight onto the laptop.
Usually a very fast process, followed by a careful period of revisions and so
on. Probably more or less the same as what everyone does. (Bonney nd)
(It is interesting that Bonney
assumes this is a common method of composition. It probably isn’t, though I
recognise it as analogous to my own methods and know of other ‘linguistically
innovative’ poets for whom this would be a familiar methodology.) The result is
a particular kind of energised text, urgent but collagic, gestural but
considered. Ian Davidson (writing of other, but contemporary, poems to Happiness by Bonney) offers an almost apologetic
formalist reading of the poems and notes the force of the words in their
iterations:
Words form
constellations and seem to spin around each other, gathering together in
clusters in order to sustain a number of diverse meanings. The emphasis on form
and discussion of poetic processes and their applications tends to suggest that
the poem is self-consciously “about” the writing process itself. Yet the poem
is also “about” other things, things that can be hard to trace through the
fractured patterns of the poem. (Davidson 2010: 37)
While it is indeed a critical
default mode to read a poem as being about itself, and while it is strictly
true that every poem is a formal model for itself (particularly the more
formally investigative or non-formulaic it is), in Happiness one of the ‘other things’ that the poems pattern
intuitively are the poems of Rimbaud themselves, fragmented into quotations,
variations, translated portions, and possibly picked out of the ‘notes from reading’ in Bonney’s notebooks for further work in improvisatory extension. One
notable aspect of the poem (which could arouse the suspicion that ‘the poem is
self-consciously “about” the writing process’) is the prevalence of linguistic
particles. ‘We were nouns,’ announces one poem. (Bonney 2011: 39) ‘There we
have a series of verbs,’ (Bonney 2011: 12) or: ‘an adverb/ think of adjectives
as refugees’. (Bonney 2011: 26). When there are so many direct political statements
of intent in the poems, indictments and incitements – ‘When you meet a Tory on
the street, cut his throat’ is one of the most notable, a nail being
recommended for the Foreign Secretary of the day’s skull is another – it seems
odd to concentrate upon such abstracting lines. But time and again, the
patterns between these contemporary references and the linguistic markers are
emphasised (Bonney 2011: 37), ‘A pronoun cluster, incinerated by dogs’ in the
same context of ‘The wide avenues of Baghdad’ makes the innocent word ‘cluster’
bristle with implication, and pronouns fragile and sentient, even human.
(Bonney 2011: 25) Like the adjectives figured as refugees, they seem
vulnerable, especially the favoured ‘we’ of Bonney’s ‘I is another’. While the
urgency of dates throughout the text suggests the contemporary, we are alerted
to an implied relationship between references to time and ones to language on
two occasions at least, as in ‘newsflash. May 2010. what we liked were / vowel
one- ’ (Bonney 2011: 24) or ‘December
2010. a high metallic wire. content exceeds phrase’. (Bonney 2011: 30) (The
near-future is evoked in ‘early 2012’ (Bonney 2011: 14) but ‘the simple prison diagram - /18th
October 1977’ (Bonney 2011: 29) alerts us to the mysterious deaths of the
Baader-Meinhof terrorist group in Stammheim prison on that date.) The presence of
dates like of ‘March 18th 1871’ points to the historical dates of
the Paris Commune and to Rimbaud’s important (dated) letters on poetics (to
borrow Bonney’s title). ‘The alphabet was a system of blackmail,’ notes Bonney,
seeing it as a coercive system of ordering and categorising (Bonney 2011: 13)
but Rimbaud had long before declared that ‘A time of universal language will
come! Only an academic – deader than a fossil – could compile a dictionary…
Weaklings who begin to think about
the first letter of the alphabet’ – Bonney’s ‘vowel one’ – would quickly go
mad!’ (Rimbaud 2008: 117) Bonney similarly dismisses academic language about
letter-sounds: ‘some crap about the immanence of vowels etc’ (‘etc’ often
functions as an index of a thought Bonney cannot be bothered to bring to
completed articulation). (Bonney 2011: 13) The desire for a new, direct revolutionary
language is expressed by Bonney in the same metaphor: ‘So rent me a gap in the
earth, a fissure in the alphabet,’ he writes, as though they were equivalent
seismic ruptures of world and word. (Bonney 2011: 45)
Behind all this
lies Rimbaud’s poem ‘Voyelles’, which is embedded, quoted or alluded to more
extensively in Bonney’s poem than any other Rimbaud work. As such the poems are
multiple but fragmentary translations of that poem into a contemporary mode.
In A Season in Hell which Bonney calls ‘it’s coming out of the pain of that
collective subjectivity returning to an isolated, personal one’ (Bonney nd)
Rimbaud refers to the poem, and says, ‘I invented colors for the vowels! … I made
rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing,
from rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or
later, would recognize.’ (Rimbaud 2008: 232) Whether we are talking of personal
synaesthesia or of Bonney’s ‘the social senses, the world turned upside down’
(Bonney nd), this poem is central to Rimbaud’s project. The poem begins:
A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O
bleu, voyelles,
Je dirai quelque jour vos
naissances lententes,
A, noir corset velu des mouches
éclantantes
Qui bombillent autour des puanteurs
cruelles,
Golfe d’ombre. (Rimbaud 2008: P.S.
19)
A black, E white, I red, U green, O
blue, vowels,
One day I’ll tell of your latent
spawnings;
A: black velveteen corset of flies
blusters and clusters over the
cruel stench,
The shadowy gulf.
(That’s my go at it. See note at
the end.)
In Bonney’s version it is not ‘I’,
but ‘they’ (28) or ‘We’ who ‘invented colours for the vowels’ (38) the
endangered pronouns interchangeable it seems. ‘We were nouns,’ he writes, but
adds ‘a black gulf where your speech is rusting politically’, (39)
translating the excremental ‘Golfe
d’ombre’ (what else would a band of flies hover over but shit?) as a place of
no language (or silent complicity and guilt), using a colour that is also a
process (rust is like objective synaesthesia). Bonney mobilises the schema of
Rimbaud’s poem for his own purposes. Sometimes he is direct and the vowels list
troubling details of a perceived political reality: ‘(a) the fusion of transnational
capital with reactionary political power/ (b) arbitrary militarisation’ etc. (Bonney
2011: 47) At other times they are about utterance: ‘(a) negates the
interruption of the speaking I - / (u) a system of collective thought’ though
even here the language of the oppressor (dole office jargon) is heard judging the oppressed: ‘((i) unable /
unwilling to find work’). The categorizing alphabet is tellingly disordered in
this repetition.
One particularly
enigmatic section contains lists of both vowels and colours, though Bonney does
not associate them, having reformed them in collagic action with other elements.
Pronouns are emphasised throughout this work; it opens: ‘mostly they have
explained your world’. Combined with the casual ‘mostly’, this isolated line is
sinister; ‘you’ has little power. The next (isolated) line ‘they invented
colours for the vowels’, reforms Rimbaud’s ‘I’ (who will be an other anyway)
into the same mysterious collective. The vowels, unlike Rimbaud’s, are not
spread across one metrical line as if in some equivalence, but arranged as a
non-alphabetical list, the items fragmentary, repetitive.
(u) glyphs & harm. understood
simply as it
(e) simply / public spheres or
stones
(o) chemicals and stones
(i) feasts of hunger, simply as in,
stones
(a) stones (Bonney 2011: 28)
Davidson could have been thinking
of the use of ‘stones’ in four of these five lines, and of ‘simply’ three
times, in this passage, when he comments: ‘The repetition in Bonney’s work,
rather than providing stability, produces instability, as a reader tries to
make connections that the poem wilfully refuses.’ (Davidson 2010: 33) ‘Give us
stones, magnificent stones,’ another poem cries, where the context is more
securely that of urban revolution, the stones the necessitous weapons of the
crowd. (Bonney 2011: 49) The ‘public spheres’ and ‘hunger’ gesture towards a
politics the lines cannot articulate; the vowels of this world are disordered. Bonney’s
desire for a form that reflects his perceived political reality (perhaps a
post-revolutionary moment after the 2010 protests and the dissipation of its
energies, and like Rimbaud of the Season)
seems realised here. Nonchalence and inconsequence battle with incoherence and
fragmentation, though there is a Rimbaudian cry for paradise:
‘so anyway’, while we were picking
berries
pretty as a kidnap / ‘our
superiors’
o paradise. here is a small door.
‘Our superiors’ is a phrase that
foregrounds the strangeness of the possessive pronoun. (Compare to ‘our
baskets’; ‘we’ possess our own inferiority, a small door for ingress and
egress). The colours, not associated with vowels, are arranged in almost
reverse order to Rimbaud’s and renounce the imagistic precision of Bonney’s
precursor, although the reference to ‘our arseholes’ (which may be equivalents
to ‘our superiors’, signalled by parallel formation) is a quote from Rimbaud’s
scatological ‘arsehole’ sonnet, and is the only complete sentence. (Rimbaud
2008: 150). The mainly abstract fragments are only conventionally associated with
the colours.
(blue) ‘the ultimatum expands on’
(green) ‘we presume the decision
not’
(red) ‘magnetic idiocies, mostly’
(white) ‘our arseholes are
different’
(black) ‘isolation in its pure
phase’
The items ‘ultimatum’ and
‘decision’ suggest the language of the administered world rather than Bonney’s
‘world turned upside down’,
but his deregulation of the language (‘isolation in its pure phase’ maybe)
offers images of the utopian (‘heaven’ against fragmented effacement (‘not
there’):
anxiously their faces, were not
there
it was a kind of heaven, scraps of
sky
cold wind. passengers and crew (Bonney 2011: 28)
Language, capitalism, revolution
and Rimbaud are entwined in another fragmented poem:
as if commodities could speak >
or fired
lived bullets & teargas, as
crackling words
encircled the last of the liberated
cities
or
the fierce buzzing of the flies (Bonney 2011: 33)
Commodity culture might confess in
language but words, the liberating vowels of Rimbaud, are transformed into the
flies of ‘Voyelles’. Live ammunition becomes lived experience in the
transformations (and translations) of Bonney’s sequence.
Note at the End: F. Scott Fitzgerald
translated this poem too, that Trimulchio of West Egg; it’s in George Steiner’s
Poem into Poem. He knew that ‘vowels’
should rhyme with ‘bowels’ to indicate that the ‘cruel stench’ was shit. He
also effects a thoroughly innovative change to the final line; where most
writers follow Rimbaud and see the return of an apocalyptic god figure – ‘O …
OMEGA … the violet light of his eyes’ –
he has the extraordinary ‘O
equals/ X-ray of her eyes; it equals sex’. It was only when I looked at the
French line that I think I saw what he was up to: ‘O l’Omega, rayon violet de
Ses Yeux’. I think, as though he were transforming the poem as a contemporary
experimental poet might, he saw the word SEX (all things being equal) in ‘O
l’Omega, rayon violet de SEs YeuX’. Se(s Yeu)x. Sex. After all, it’s a poem
about letters. You'll have to wait for my version of 'Petrarch 3' (a derivative derive after Peter Hughes and Tim Atkins) which is also a version of 'Voyelles', if you can imagine such a thing.
(accessed 18 February 2014)
Cooke, Jennifer. ‘Sean’s Four
Letter’d Words’. Damn the Caesars. Summer
2012: 27-8.
Davidson, Ian. Radical Spaces of Poetry. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Rimbaud, Arthur. tr. Schmidt, Paul.
Complete Works. New
York, London,
etc: Harper Perennial, 2008.
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
